Unverified Voracity Looks At Manning

Roy Manning return? With Jerry Montgomery gone to Oklahoma, Michigan needs to fill a spot on their coaching staff. No, it will not be Mike Hart or Ty Wheatley. It'll be a defensive guy. But there is another dude floating out there who is a young former Michigan player: Roy Manning.

Manning was a little-regarded recruit who came seemingly out of nowhere to start as a senior and did well enough to get drafted and have a few years in the NFL. Like Montgomery, he's become a hot name hopping to and fro. He was hired at Cincinnati in February, got a standing ovation for doing so, and had just landed at NIU after Jones took the Tennessee job. Fluff bits:

He's got a Ron English basso going on.

Home ice and the future. Michigan finishes its regular season this weekend with a home and home against Ferris State needing a sweep and some help to secure a first-round home series in the playoffs. If they don't acquire the requisite points, Michigan's last home game in front of the students will have been the February 1st matchup with Michigan State. Which… wow. Just another way in which this season has been bizarre and disappointing.

It's senior day for the, uh, seniors, and it looks like a pretty manageable class to replace:

AJ Treais: Tied for second in scoring with 11-12-23; had excellent start to the year and tailed off as guys like Sinelli and Copp moved onto his wing because they did that skating hard stuff. Copp has actually produced decently, but not having a reliable offensive option on the other wing has hampered production from him.

Kevin Lynch: I have no idea what line he's on; ideally would have become a Rust-like shutdown center. Instead is anonymous middle-of-lineup guy with 6-13-19.

Lindsay Sparks: diminutive winger will go down as Craig Murray 2010 for me, a player on the third line who I liked more than is rational and spent four years expecting a breakout from that never came. 4-4-8 in 16 games this year.

Jeff Rohrkemper: fourth line jack of all trades.

The key, of course, is what happens with Michigan's offseason defections. There are a ton of guys who are departure threats, starting with the dream D pairing of Merrill and Trouba and extending to Nieves, Guptill, Bennett, and Di Giuseppe. While none of those extended guys seems NHL-ready, Guptill was left at home for a series this year and is a third-rounder. He seems like a candidate for the Chris Brown "really?" departure.

My lowest moment of my career was probably be my first year, [Rich Rodriguez'] last season, when I was playing scout team left guard. I had thought about if this decision was right for me. I wasn’t playing my position and going against Mike Martin all the time.

Despite being a freshman walk-on tight end, he did not die. I'm using Mike Kwiatkowski as a bomb shelter in the event we teleport back to 1980 and there is a nuclear war on.

No more flyovers? Step A in any debate about cutting spending is to go right to the stuff that people notice no matter how small. Like flyovers:

Federal budget cuts would end flyovers at sports events

Of course, they have to fly the planes at some point—can't have a war with a bunch of crop dusters flying F-16s unless you can start cloning Randy Quaid—so the net additional cost of having some of those flights buzz stadiums is, um…

“It’s no additional cost to the government for support of any public events. Typically, if you see a unit fly over a football game, that is 90 seconds out of a several hour training sortie that they’re flying.”

Zero? Here is someone's attempt to explain why this is a thing:

"We just have a reduced number of those training hours, and so everything is being dedicated to just preparing for that overseas deployment and for flying that's actually happening overseas," Varhegyi said.

Not very good. Later they mention that Army/Navy/Air Force sports could get hit despite 95% of Navy's funding coming from sources other than the government. Filed under scare tactic—dollars to donuts the flyovers continue.

Something that is not true at all. Drew Henson talks about his brief baseball career in a non-bylined article that prevents me from hammering whatever intern wrote this:

But he always had his sights set on baseball — simply, he said it was more fun — and even signed with the Yankees after they made him a third-round pick in 1998. They agreed to let him finish his college football career, and he played summer ball in the Yankees system while still at U-M.

John Navarre would not be a divisive figure if this was true. Oh, and Michigan probably would have been awesome in 2001. Also that article is based on another article, which it links right at the end of the piece in a non-underlined URL link. Bad intern.

But I would guess that flying warplanes over stadia filled with people would be the ideal training. I mean all those poeple just sitting there, out in the open. Be easier than going after baddies one at a time at night by helicopter.

Ha freaking ha. Flyovers allow for timing practice and formation discipline, plus for a pilot they are fun as all get out for the pilot flying them(used to be one). Their primary purpose is PR, admittedly, but the stadium full of people but was over the line.

...but I've alwasy felt that flyovers & other overt displays of the military at games were unnecessary. Patriotism is fine and all but it feels a bit at odds with the sporting ideal of peaceful competition to be flashing military hardware.

years ago, flyovers had to be requested. It isn't like the Air Guard, USAF, or USNAVY think to themselves, "wouldn't it be cool to overfly Michigan Stadium just before kickoff"? Nope, that would be the University of Michigan Athletic Department through the University, that is requesting and coordinating the flyover. So if you have a burr under your saddle, you might want to take it up with the University, not the Military.

And I've been accused on this very blog of having no sense of humor, but isn't the comment, "hey look an airplane" mocking people who like flyovers? I guess it could be sarcasm, but I don't think the poster you are ridiculing is ridiculous for taking it at its word that the commenter who said both, "flyovers are stupid" and "hey look, an airplane." may in fact actually think that flyovers are stupid.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't fighter jets awesome? I was under the impression they were awesome. And I like seeing awesome things I don't get to see very often, especially in action (well, in motion at least). Very rarely during a flyover do you see anyone not watch, and almost all of those people seem to think it's pretty cool.

When I lived in San Diego I used to drive under miramar air base every day for work. Usually something was in the air and I would look at it as long as I could while driving . I agree jets are pretty cool they feed the boy inside.

Though I believe they are over done. More than once a year, not including the occasional skydiver, and IMO, flyovers lose their luster.

Side note, as a young lad in the early '60s, I thought it was way cool when interceptors would go sonic over A2. My mother, on the other hand, wasn't so enthused and did cartwheels when the FAA, or whomever, put a stop to it.

In theory Lindsay Sparks was the ultimate weapon and the coaches tried really hard to get him on the ice. The thought of having that speed on the PK, the powerplay and 5 on 5 was too much for the coaches to let go of.

The average CCHA defensemen could easily backskate with him and his game was one dimensional, since his defense was horrible there's no point in having him out there.

We will always have the "What might have been" everytime we think of Sparks. We will also always have that tweet to remind Brian.

How do you have a rule about no talk of politics, delete a thread about flyovers because it got to political, then on the same day, make political comments on that same topic? Does that make it fair game to comment on your political opinion about the cutting of flyovers being, "scare tactics."?

Well, it is his blog so he can post what he wants moreso than the MGoCommunity, but I'd also argue that Brian's statement had little to do with politics and more to do with the fact that it was is a story about college sporting events. He is just saying that when the USA Today (one of the most read papers in the country) has a story about no flyovers at sporting events and in that same article points out coherent reasons why it shouldn't happen, one should perhaps question the merits of the original claim.

But when he holds himself to a different standard with regards to a pretty badic and strictly enforced rule, that seems to me to be wrong. While I understand you argue that the statement is not political, I do not see how that could be so. Just because USA Today points out reasons it should not happen, that does not mean there are not legitimate counterarguments.

Something has to be cut,. There are choices about what has to be cut. The leaders of the organizations making the decisions are political appointees. That seems to suggest that politics could be involved in the choice.

Characterizing the choice as "scare tactics" seems to imply the coice was made for political purposes. That seems to be bringing politics to the blog. Furthermore, early today, a thread on this very topic was locked down because it became to political.

I happen to also think that the choice to cut this part of the training rather than other training was politically motivated. I just don't think it eas a "scare tactic". I think it was the only way to really bring home to much of the american public that this sequester is impacting the amount of training our military does.

Please every single cut trotted out in front of us has been designed to scare us. Can't deploy a carrier, firefighters out on the street, etc. the scare tactic thing isn't political by this point it's a simple observation.

speakng for Zone Left, Brian isn't either instructing the mod team on what to do (obviously he'd just do it himself) or giving feedback on every action. Assuming ZL gets the same stuff PGB and I do, Brian didn't have anything to say about the original thread getting locked.

Getting to the point: it's Brian's show, but he isn't personally involved with things like locking threads most of the time. He might have left it up (as profit originally wanted) or done the same thing ZL did if he was the "mod" who made the call; we don't know which way he would have gone.

While the no fly-overs issue itself is sports related, it is clearly only a very small part of a much larger political issue. I personally think zone left made the right call.

With regards to the small flyover part of the issue - how can that be a scare tactic? Is anyone scared that we aren't having flyovers? Flyovers are about PR, not training. By combining it with training, it is a very smart way to get low cost or free PR. In this case, the military has decided that the PR they'd prefer at the moment is that our armed forces are getting less training. Unless one is going to argue that given the rules of the sequester, they don't have to cut any training, this seems to me to be a smart move, not a scare tactic.

Because I read it on the App and it seemed pretty tame. There was one joke that someone didn't get that people took offense to, but it really wasn't much worse than the "gay questions at the combines" thread. ZL said there were F bombs galore, but other than Team America quotes I didn't catch that. So I wonder if people got Ziggy-d before it got locked.

As I've noted, choosing to use the term scare tactics moves from reporting to opinion. Its opinion on a politcal topic. If an exception is being made for this particular topic, and it is ok to discuss politics that is one thing. If Brian is allowed to voice a political opinion and no one can disagree that is hypocrocy.

It's Brian's blog, so it's Brian's right - I just feel he should be called on it.

There's plenty of good about this blog and its his baby, so he does get to make the rules. I have been reading it for a long time and its not like this is a recurring issue. Frankly its in large part because of the othe thread that got taken down that I made the point.